Chicago Stockyards

From the moment Jean Baptiste Point du Sable founded a trading post on the mouth of a river, Chicago has been a city undergoing change and rapid development. But few have burrowed as deeply into the city's DNA as the Union Stock Yard and Packingtown.

For tourists in the late 19th and early 20th century, "the yards" were as symbolic of Chicago as Al Capone and Michael Jordan were in their times. And the stockyards remain a point of civic pride with scores of local residents, 44 years after they shut down.

The history of the stockyards is the subject of Dominic Pacyga's "Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World it Made." For Pacyga, a...

Related "Chicago Stockyards" Articles

From the moment Jean Baptiste Point du Sable founded a trading post on the mouth of a river, Chicago has been a city undergoing change and rapid development. But few have burrowed as deeply into the city's DNA as the Union Stock Yard and Packingtown.
For...

Published in Chicago Tribune on November 08, 2015 — Print headline: "Yard work - Dominic Pacyga traces the history of Chicago, and his family, in the story of Chicago's Packingtown"

You don't need anybody to tell you Chicago is a food city or to extol the virtues of chicken Vesuvio, deep dish pizza, a jibarito, South Side rib tips or a Vienna Beef hot dog (on a poppy seed bun, of course).
But perhaps less well known is how Chicago's...

"Slaughterhouse" by Dominic A. Pacyga will be published by University of Chicago in October. Pacyga explores the history of the Union Stock Yards, from its opening on Christmas Day 1865 to its closing in 1971, and looks at the stockyards' present-day...

Outside Thalia Hall, the most happening new spot in Chicago's emerging Pilsen neighborhood, I do a double take. It's a freezing night, and there's a small woman with a guitar slung over her back standing in the recess of a doorway. "Come into my...

For most of the 53 years Robert Hellom worked at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel, he was a server of dinner and drinks to gala attendees and celebrity visitors, many guests asking for him by name when they arrived at the hotel’s elegant banquet facilities....

A year after a roof collapse that killed two Chicago firefighters, more than 100 of their brethren gathered at the fire scene--now a vacant lot--to memorialize them and every other Chicago firefighter who died on this date. Firefighters Corey Ankum,...